Assassination of a Critic

“Rhymes in poems are dead,” he said. I laughed and shouldered the bazooka, shook a Vicodin from the bottle and chased it with gin. (Now I’m all-in, you dig?) The room started to spin. I grabbed the mantle like Mickey Mantle grabbing a bat. I put on my square-jaw look: me and the fireplace, burning. Turning to my antagonist— an academic herbalist with a cyst above his brow— I figured the time was now. I sighted the cyst and cocked the trigger. “Rhymes ain’t dead, buddy boy,” I said. “You are.”

Lance Jencks has been writing poetry for fifty years. In the 1970s he earned an MFA in playwriting and a PhD in Contemporary Theatre. In the 1980s he published his verse-based roman á clef, "The Wisdom of Southern California," then toured that region with a one-man show of the same name. Lance has been an advertising copywriter, a stock-and-bond broker, and the guy who hooks your car to the chain at the car wash. He lives today in Newport Beach, California, where he was recently featured in the epic bodysurfing movie "Dirty Old Wedge" on Amazon.